Modi Goes to China
With the US incoherent, how to capitalize?
By: Nirupama Subramanian
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting Beijing after a short stopover in Japan this weekend, hoping to salvage his assiduously cultivated self-image as a powerful international leader and his government's foreign policy, which claims to have given the country its rightful place in the world. Both are in shreds after two months of US President Donald Trump's tariff predations.
Modi's meeting with China's President Xi Jinping, scheduled for tomorrow (August 30), is their second within a year aimed at fast-tracking normalizations that began in early 2024, and was officially greenlighted when the two met at Kazan in Russia for the annual summit of the BRICS last October.
It is also Modi's first visit to China since 2018, when the two leaders met in Wuhan and chatted through a walk in a beautiful garden in what was billed as an “informal” summit. Xi returned the visit next year for another informal summit at Mahabalipuram, a beach resort in southern India with an ancient temple in the shore and rock carvings.
The bonhomie was short-lived. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Chinese incursions in eastern Ladakh along the Line of Control that serves as a de facto boundary between the two countries, contested by both in many places along its 3,600 km-length on the Himalaya, came as a rude shock to India.
For a highly disputed border, it had remained peaceful for several decades, but in June 2020, amidst efforts to resolve the new crisis, 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a fierce clash with Chinese soldiers in Ladakh's Galwan area. The PLA has so far acknowledged the deaths of four of its soldiers in that clash. From Galwan to Tianjin, Modi and India have travelled a long road, from denial to anger, negotiations and acceptance.
In January 2024, Trump was just a little dot on the horizon when both sides began reaching out. The Chinese economic slowdown and India's stagnant manufacturing saw both sides send out signals that it was time to turn the page on Ladakh. On the Indian side, economic policy makers and industry wanted the government to remove restrictions on Chinese investment in place after the Galwan clash. On the Chinese side, an unstable border did not sit well with a slowing economy. By October, both countries were additionally gearing for Trump 2.0, fast turning from a dot into reality. Both sides began a slow process of normalizing ties.
Fast forward to 2025, and Trump's anticipated trade war against China in March unexpectedly morphed into a fierce tariff attack on India by the middle of the year. India watched with disbelief. Even worse, Trump, for whom Modi campaigned at an Indian diaspora gathering at Houston before the 2019 US presidential elections, and large sections of Indian immigrants voted in the 2024 election, was even supping with India's arch enemy Pakistan, having lunch with its de facto military ruler and tying up agreements for minerals and oil exploration, while his family did crypto deals with the country.
From August 26, tariffs on Indian exports to the US are at 50 percent, with 25 percent a “sanction” for buying Russian oil. India is now the only country other than Brazil to be tariffed by Trump at 50 percent. China, which stared Trump down back in March and got tariffed at 145 percent, is now down to 30 percent.
Trump sped up what was inevitable and already happening. Xu Feihong, China's ambassador to India, said: “The US has imposed tariffs of up to 50 percent on India and even threatened more. China firmly opposes it. In the face of such acts, silence or compromise only emboldens the bully. China will firmly stand with India to uphold the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core,” making common cause with India.
An economic common cause between the world's number one manufacturing power and a country with whom it has a trade surplus of US$113.5 billion of total bilateral trade of US$127.8 billion seems unlikely. Closer economic collaboration with a China looking for markets other than the US is fraught with several dangers for India. An even bigger trade deficit is just one risk.
India's attempts to kickstart its manufacturing sector to mitigate unemployment at home, its attempts to project itself as a China plus 1 to the West, and attracting higher US tariffs for closer economic ties with China are other big risks in an unpredictable global environment.
For India, the normalization with China may be a geopolitical compulsion, but it also presents the ruling BJP with political challenges.
First, how to reconcile the embrace with its earlier false rhetoric for domestic audiences telling how Modi, India's “strongest Prime Minister ever,” showed Xi his place after Galwan (and an earlier military face off at Dokalam in Bhutan, which forms a trijunction with India and China); second, how to reconcile normalization with statements promising “no business as usual with China” unless the situation at the Line of Actual Control goes back to status quo ante, that is as it was before the Chinese inroads in April 2020, and with statements by a cabinet minister declaring that Aksai Chin, a territory in Ladakh that China seized in the 1950s, is an “integral part of India.”
Third, how to tell the nation that Modi is ready to embrace that very country that has been widely villainized in India for assisting arch enemy Pakistan during the four day military conflict in May, following a terrorist attack on tourists in Jammu & Kashmir. Indian officials have in the past raised red flags over the presence of Chinese troops in the part of Kashmir that is controlled and administered by Pakistan.
From the time of the Galwan clash, the Modi government has pushed back on the Congress-led opposition's demands for a debate in Parliament on the Modi government's China policy. As Modi departed from India, Congress spokesman Jairam Ramesh wrote on X that India was being “forced to normalize ties with China, and largely on Beijing's terms.”
In a way, blaming Trump allows Modi to duck the difficult questions raised at home. There was a time when an Indian prime minister could tell a US president that the people of India loved him. Trump has replaced Xi as India's new bogeyman. But normalizing with China on the rebound from the US will be seen in Beijing as a sign of India's weakness, warned Ashok Kantha, a former Indian diplomat who was ambassador to Beijing from 2014 to 2016.
“My own experience of dealing with China is that if we engage with them from position of weakness or perceived vulnerability, we are not in a good place,” Kanthae said in a recent interview. “So at this point of time any expectation that trying to make up with China will somehow give us more ballast or will compensate for strategic deficit in our relations with the US will be an ill founded premise because the nature of our relations with China very different. It remains a difficult complex relationship. Convergence of strategic interests at this point of time is very limited.”
Modi's stopover in Japan was perhaps intended to signal against this very perception of weakness, a small flex of the multi-alignment muscle. Modi and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba discussed economic ties and Japanese investment in India. They were set to release a “2035 vision document.” Japan and India are members of the Quad, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, along with the US and Australia. The Quad is seen, including in Beijing, as an anti-China group.
But the Quad is no longer on the mind of the US president, who in his first term, convened the first meeting of Quad leaders. Instead, Trump seems to believe the US can do a deal with China, with an October visit in the air.
If anything, Modi's Japan-China outing underlines that the “vishwaguru,” the world's teacher, as Modi once described India during its G-20 year, is grappling for answers in a constantly shifting world.